Chapter 1 In This Chapter Figuring out global versus local control MA Getting acquainted with the InDesign approach TE RI AL Understanding InDesign Ingredients Getting up to speed on the InDesign vocabulary Exploring the document window D Surveying the top tools S GH Discovering what’s in the menus TE Becoming familiar with tools and panels PY RI tarting to use a new software application is not unlike meeting a new friend for the first time.
t I: Before You Begin InDesign CS4 has an annoying new feature of hiding menu options from you. The goal is to be less intimidating, but it also means if you don’t know what InDesign can do, you won’t find out by looking at the menus. Fortunately, you can tell InDesign to show you all the menus all the time, so no features are hidden. Here’s how: Choose Window➪Workspace➪Show Full Menus. This book assumes that you’ve turned the menus all on.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Keep your bearings straight A powerful but confusing capability in InDesign is something called a control point. InDesign lets you work with objects from nine different reference points — any of the four corners, the middle of any of the four sides, or the center — such as when positioning the object precisely or rotating the object.
12 Part I: Before You Begin Specifying measurement values Another situation in which you can choose between local or global controls is specifying measurement values. Regardless of the default measurement unit you set (that is, the measurement unit that appears in all dialog boxes and panels), you can use any unit when entering measurements in an InDesign dialog box.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Mastering Basic InDesign Vocabulary All industries have their jargon to describe unique approaches, tools, attributes, and specifications. Publishing is no different. Its vocabulary includes pica, kerning, crop, and color model. But because programs like InDesign bring a once-specialized capability to the masses, the terms are sometimes used incorrectly.
14 Part I: Before You Begin Discovering the Document Window In InDesign, you spend lots of time working in document windows — the “containers” for your documents. Each document, regardless of its size, is contained within its own document window. The best way to get familiar with the InDesign document window is by opening a blank document. Simply choosing File➪New➪Document (Ô+N or Ctrl+N) and clicking OK opens a new document window. Don’t worry about the settings for now — just explore.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients The Version Cue pop-up menu lets you see the current status of a document in a shared workgroup setup. You can ignore this expert feature. The new Preflight pop-up menu helps deal with any issues that can affect printing, as Chapter 23 explains. And the new Search menu lets you look for files on your computer and in Adobe Bridge. Rulers Document windows display a horizontal ruler across the top and a vertical ruler down the left side.
t I: Before You Begin the X: and Y: values in the Control panel update as you drag the zero point so that you can place it precisely. If you change the zero point, it changes for all pages or spreads in the document. You can reset the zero point to the upper-left corner of the left-most page by double-clicking the intersection of the rulers in the upper-left corner. If you move the zero point, all the objects on the page display new X: and Y: values even though they haven’t actually moved.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients With the application frame, Mac users can now put all the InDesign elements in their own container so that they don’t float freely and other applications don’t peek through. You show the application frame by choosing Window➪Application Frame — doing so makes InDesign for Mac behave like InDesign for Windows. (By default, the application frame is turned off in InDesign for Mac.
t I: Before You Begin Pages and guides Pages, which you can see on-screen surrounded by black outlines, reflect the page size you set up in the New Document dialog box (File➪New➪Document [Ô+N or Ctrl+N]). If in your document window it looks like two or more pages are touching, you’re looking at a spread. InDesign uses nonprinting guides, lines that show you the position of margins and that help you position objects on the page.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients You can also use the Pages panel to navigate your document, as Chapter 4 explains. pening Multiple Document Windows If you like to work on more than one project at once, you’ve come to the right program. InDesign lets you open several documents at once. It also lets you open multiple windows simultaneously for individual documents. A large monitor (or having multiple monitors connected) makes this multiwindow feature even more useful.
20 Part I: Before You Begin Windows option (single-window icon) in the Arrange Documents pop-up menu in the application bar. If you don’t like the tabbed approach to windows and instead want to use the old-style approach of stacked windows, you can. Just choose Window➪Arrange➪Float All in Windows. You can then move the individual windows around the screen as desired; if they get too messy, choose Windows➪Arrange➪Cascade to tell InDesign to make them all neat and tidy in a cascaded stack.
gure 1-2: The nDesign ls panel eft) and its popout tools Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients InDesign gives you one — and only one — tool for each specific job. The Tools panel includes tools for creating and manipulating the objects that make up your designs. The tools in the Tools panel are similar to those in other Adobe products (such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver). I cover what each tool does in the following sections.
22 Part I: Before You Begin Using the Selection tools To work with objects, you have to select them. InDesign provides three tools to do that, letting you select different aspects of objects. Selection tool The Selection tool is perhaps the most-used tool in InDesign. With the Selection tool, you can select objects on the page and move or resize them. You may want to think of this tool as the Mover tool because it’s the only tool that lets you drag objects around on-screen.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Figure 1-3: Reshape an item with the Direct Selection tool by clicking and dragging an anchor point.
24 Part I: Before You Begin Using the object-creation tools InDesign has a bunch of tools for creating shapes. Part V covers them in more depth, but you should know about a few of them now because they create objects that can contain either text or graphics. Plus, you can also use them to draw your own shapes that you then color or otherwise embellish in your layout. Here’s what you need to know: Pen tool: With the Pen tool, you can create simple illustrations.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Hand tool: The Hand tool lets you move a page around to view different portions of it or another page entirely. After selecting the Hand tool, click and drag in any direction. You can access the Hand tool temporarily without actually switching tools by pressing Option+spacebar or Alt+spacebar. For a quick way to pan through your document, make sure that the Hand tool is active. Then click and hold the mouse. InDesign will zoom out and display a red rectangle.
26 Part I: Before You Begin Using contextual menus InDesign’s contextual menu interface element is very useful. By Control+clicking or rightclicking the document, an object, elements listed in a panel (such as a list of files or styles), the rulers, and so on, you can display a menu of options for modifying whatever it is you clicked.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Any active panel has a collapse control (the >> icon). For panels in the dock, clicking that icon collapses it back into the dock. For panels not in the dock (that is, for floating panels), collapsing them shrinks the panel to a much smaller size to get them out of the way. When collapsed, these panels will have a << icon to expand them again.
28 Part I: Before You Begin All but three panels have a tab, which contains its name, to help you select the desired panel without having to go to the Window menu. The three special panels (without tabs) are the Tools, Control, and Quick Apply panels. Unlike the rest of InDesign’s panels, they can’t be grouped with other panels, so you don’t need a tab to select them.
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients gure 1-5: The coled dock rols are e default ay (left), you can expand m to see options (right). Working with workspaces Although you can rearrange InDesign’s panels to suit your needs, rearranging again and again as you switch from one task to another can be a real chore.
30 Part I: Before You Begin Surveying the Menus Although InDesign relies heavily on its panels to present its rich capabilities, it also uses traditional menus. In some cases, you can use menus instead of panels; in others, you must use a menu command; in still others, you must use a panel (such as for the data merge and object alignment features).
Chapter 1: Understanding InDesign Ingredients Object: You use this menu to change the shape, size, location, and other attributes of objects, such as frames and lines; apply special effects to objects; insert multimedia effects such as buttons; and control display redraw speed. Note that the Text Frame Options, Anchored Object, Corner Options, Clipping Path, and Convert Shape menu items’ functions aren’t available through panels. Table: Use this menu to create, change, and format tables and cells.
32 Part I: Before You Begin
